Читать книгу The Customer Education Playbook - Daniel Quick - Страница 42

One piece of advice I'd give on setting goals for customer education is to think strategically. I remember a point at Optimizely where my boss at the time felt our team wasn't meeting expectations. They said that we weren't moving fast enough or solving customer problems. I needed to find and achieve quicker wins that would prove value, and then get more proactive about solving larger customer needs and aligning those with business metrics. This was a turning point for me. I realized that if executives were going to trust me, and care about customer education, they needed to see me doing more than churning out content; they needed to understand the story of what I was doing.

We had launched a webinar series that just hadn't moved the needle on customer retention, and in hindsight, I can see that we didn't know why customers were churning in the first place, so a webinar on how to use the product wasn't going to help! We changed tack and started doing more strategic work to improve the knowledge base, fill gaps in search terms, and target areas where we knew CS were answering the same questions over and over. We analyzed the largest ticket categories and used customer feedback to decide what content to create, improve, or deprecate … and we started hitting the mark more consistently.

As a result, CS had more time to focus on deeper problems, and we could use data on ticket deflection rates and onboarding efficiency to prove our impact. This gave us leverage to move onto other projects across the business. For example, customers were telling the CSMs that they needed help to go from 0–60 faster, and after several iterations, that became the basis of Optiverse, our consolidated support community, academy, and resource center. The product team was running in-product education and onboarding guides, but they realized it made sense for us to take ownership and enhance those programs so we could drive better product adoption and convert more free trials to paid accounts. We had launch managers onboarding enterprise customers, but we were able to take ownership of that process too, and build a training services function. As we continued to prove value, our customer education portfolio grew, and we got more buy-in to create our own projects, too.